An Uncertainty- and Collusion-Proof Voting Consensus Mechanism in Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel voting consensus mechanism for blockchain that reduces wrong elections and bribery by addressing candidate uncertainties and voter egoism, supported by theoretical analysis using large deviation theory.

Contribution

It proposes a new uncertainty- and collusion-proof voting algorithm with trustworthiness evaluation, and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing voting failure rates and system parameters.

Findings

Reduces wrong elections by addressing candidate uncertainties.

Motivates truthful voting through an incentive-compatible scoring rule.

Provides theoretical bounds on voting failure rates and decay speed.

Abstract

Though voting-based consensus algorithms in Blockchain outperform proof-based ones in energy- and transaction-efficiency, they are prone to incur wrong elections and bribery elections. The former originates from the uncertainties of candidates' capability and availability; and the latter comes from the egoism of voters and candidates. Hence, in this paper, we propose an uncertainty- and collusion-proof voting consensus mechanism, including the selection pressure-based voting consensus algorithm and the trustworthiness evaluation algorithm. The first algorithm can decrease the side effects of candidates' uncertainties, lowering wrong elections while trading off the balance between efficiency and fairness in electing miners. The second algorithm adopts an incentive compatible scoring rule to evaluate the trustworthiness of voting, motivating voters to report true beliefs on candidates by making egoism in consistent with altruism so as to avoid bribery elections. A salient feature of our work is theoretically analyzing the proposed voting consensus mechanism by the large deviation theory. Our analysis provides not only the voting failure rate of a candidate but also its decay speed, based on which the concepts of {\it the effective selection valve} and {\it the effective expectation of merit} are introduced to help the system designer to determine the optimal voting standard and guide a candidate to behave in an optimal way for lowering the voting failure rate.